


In the Blood, in the Heart

by TychoBrandt



Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 4
Genre: Crouching McCarthyist Hidden Communist, F/M, Love, Marriage and Domesticity, Multi, Platonic and otherwise, Post traumatic stress mismanagement, Questionable soldiering, The American Dream, Upper-middle-class existentialism, and waking up, for in these trying times anyone could be a Communist
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-07-05
Updated: 2017-11-28
Packaged: 2018-11-23 14:06:12
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,858
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11403975
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TychoBrandt/pseuds/TychoBrandt
Summary: Adam, the lover, the fighter. Yumei, the skeptic. And then there is Lascaux. It is the 2070s, they are young, they are full of hope. They all have their crosses to bear.And you, too, will bear a cross; yours shall be of iron. And when you hang from it, you will look down and see the world as it remains.As it has been burnt away to reveal your image.





	1. Womb

War.

War never changes.

It was Cain, the unloved son, who so consumed with rage slew his brother Abel. But the guilt could not be hidden-- for beneath the soil wetted by Abel's red tears, the blood of the brother cried out to God. But not in a plea of mercy for his brother Cain.

No. It was a howl for vengeance.

Roots runneth deep. From that despoiled earth grew mankind, the great accuser. They heard not the voices of God, nor of angels, nor of saints. They went forth and multiplied and grew ever more sinful. Try as God might, tide nor wind nor storm would cleanse the earth of such a plague.

But as mankind defied God, ultimately, their own pride defied them. One bright morning, 2077 years after the son of God's failed sacrifice, four great hands of nuclear fire descended from heaven and immolated all life with a single touch. The seas dried in an instant, leaving only a salty lymph. The earth convulsed as long-sleeping volcanoes erupted, great chasms were torn open in the earth's skin, and towering mountain ranges rose up to pierce the clouds of soot.

God beheld the scorched earth, where the sand and stones still glowed a carnal red from the flames, shrouded in the silent darkness of a nuclear winter, and was sorrowful.

The black clouds parted, and a harsh sun gave light to the earth, showing a dead land no creature could live upon.

From the smoldering ashes, man raised itself up, bones standing stark against charred black flesh. It opened its blind white eyes, and from a lipless mouth, whispered unto a deaf sky.

"Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

And God was afraid.


	2. Who is Like

The Vault-Tec representative glances about the dimly lit study, hands gripping the arms of the leather chair.

This was not the first time he had been invited into a potential client's home. Indeed, it happened quite often--well, in the beginning, anyway, when people did not entirely grasp what he was selling. That was when he began seeing more closed doors than faces.

He got used to it. Apocalypticism was not really a subject one usually broached in polite company. And between the economy and the war and the elections, well, was it any surprise--

"And here we are."

The representative gave a start, in spite of himself. He prided himself on nerves of steel, his mettle tested by countless Vault-Tec emergency drills and work parties--but there was something off about this man.

He was just beyond marrying age, and lived alone. He seemed to have a meticulousness towards fashion and grooming, even within the privacy of his own home. The representative’s brow furrows--could this man possibly be what the papers talked about? A ‘confirmed bachelor,’ in the wild?

… And was he in its den?

"Ah, yes--thank you, thank you." The representative takes the cool glass of whiskey with both hands.

"So," the man says, sitting opposite in another leather armchair. His head tilts lazily to the side. "Enlighten me about this so-called Vault. One-hundred-and-eleven, I believe you said?"

\--- 

Major Adam Smithson, Army Special Forces. Son of Seth, son of Seth, son of Keenan, son of Jared, son of Noah. Soldiering ran in his blood more than blood itself, a molten alloy of iron and lead and the tears of widows. Deployed to… well, he couldn’t really say. Operational security. Op-sec, in the jargon of the cannon fodder. But reports of trails of butchered Communists, played on repeat by American news broadcasts, left little to the imagination. Lascaux couldn’t help but glance now and again at Adam’s hands, to see if he had scrubbed under his fingernails. 

When the Smithsons threw house parties--and God, they threw them--it would inevitably be brought up. Adam, the leader, the soldier, the hero. The men who were cowardly enough to escape the draft would ask, breathlessly clutching their highballs, for war stories. For tales of his valor. 

It was about that time that Lascaux would leave the room. Upstairs. Outside. It didn’t matter. He knew how Adam would react: with humility, with kindness, with selflessness, and finally with an attempt to elevate Lascaux in the eyes of their peers.

“What do you do, Vic?” the partygoers would say, unsure of what tone of reverence to address him with. 

“Corps of Engineers. Electricity, water, roads, bridges, fallout management.”

“Oh,” they would say, rolling their eyes and getting another drink.

Lascaux chewed his ice to keep from chewing his glass.

\---

“You doing okay?”

Lascaux didn’t look up at Yumei’s voice. He just kept staring out across their backyard, over their pool, into the light-polluted sky.

“Yeah.”

He can’t lie to Yumei, so he doesn’t put much effort into it. 

She knows his routine, by now--then again, she caught on after the first time. Lascaux can only take so many hours (well, minutes) of polite, domestic, American mingling before he needs to eject-the-fuck-out like a fighter pilot over Moscow on Victory Parade Day. 

So they sit there, together, saying nothing, looking up at blind sky. 

She could tell him that he doesn’t need to go to these things--that they’re just a formality, a way to keep the peace with the neighbors, that Adam doesn’t really like it either. But it means a lot to Adam to have Lascaux backing him up--two soldiers amongst soft civilians. So Lascaux bears it as much as he can, every time, pretending to not care and to show up… just because.

“Thank you,” Lascaux says, unsure why.

“You don‘t have to.”

“I want to.”

“Well, I don’t want you to.”

So, from then on, he doesn’t. And that’s that.

\---

Before we begin, let us take a look at the one called Victor Lascaux. Not a long look, but enough to understand who he is. Or what he is, at least. 

He had one mother, and one father, as was the style at the time. Both loved him, though in different ways, and the mother more than the father, as, again, was the style at the time. Their names are not particularly important, as is the case with most parents.

He was born small and late, and spoke late, and walked late. His parents were concerned, the neighbors whispered, and the doctors wrung their white-gloved hands, but little Victor lived up to his namesake and defied the infant mortality statistics. The U.S. Census Bureau took note, surely.

We will not overdwell on Lascaux's childhood and the trauma within (or lack thereof), for we are not psychiatrists. If you actually are a psychiatrist, well, by now you are used to being disappointed by patients, so this will all be very familiar to you.

He lived a painfully ordinary life. The most remarkable things about Victor Lascaux were perhaps his very neat handwriting, easily mistakable for typescript at a distance; or that he wrote upon graph paper instead of lined all through school. He said the Pledge of Allegiance three times a day like the rest of the children, and partook in the burning of the red-and-gold flag of Communist revolutionaries on Joseph McCarthy Day. He could duck and cover underneath his desk with perfect form when the bombing drills went off, and though he was shockingly terrible at America’s pastime (a psychological result of being picked last every time at recess), he somehow could recall the results of the past fifty American League championships without error. And woe to the schoolyard joker who called him a “French faggot,” for they would soon find themselves sprawled at the base of the flagpole after school. To be sure, he possessed just enough typical deviation from the societal norm to be normal.

Up to West Point, that is. Things changed, then. Because that is when he met Adam Smithson, and life as he knew it became quite different.

\---

The unlikeliest of places: Quebec. There, his uncles and cousins taught him in days what West Point could not in years:

How to string a bow and shoot it like a man. 

There was little wilderness left in the United States. One had to drive the backroads for hours and hours to see the stars, much less greenery that hadn’t been agonizingly manicured. Aside from the occasional raccoon or opossum or pigeon, there was little wildlife to see within the eyeshot of city lights.

Lascaux had never killed anything before. Ants, cockroaches, houseflies, the pride of schoolyard rivals, but little else. But he wanted to. For what seventeen year old boy, red-blooded and blue-balled, did not want to kill?

The arrow missed the heart.

The caribou ran for a mile, the pain and the taste of its own hot blood driving it mad. And the humans pursued, the thrill and the scent of that hot blood driving them mad. And then, the heaving beast rounded on them--and looked down at them, with pure contempt--and fell.

Steam rose from its body.

Lascaux had killed.

Lascaux would kindle that small solace, whenever Adam outshot him on the range, or outwrestled him in the ring, or outran him in the field, or outdrank him at the bar. It was a solace that required quite a bit of kindling, as you can imagine.

There were no deer left in Massachusetts but for the last nature preserve. So the two of them trekked out between the few remaining trees and set up their targets stolen from the range: red-eyed and befanged Chinese Communists, of course.

"Watch and learn." Lascaux drew, and shot.

Adam, with his characteristic sureness, drew and shot. 

It was ugly and raw and beautiful. 

"Like that?" he asked, tentative yet hopeful.

Lascaux frowned. "Watch me again."

\---

He was reading the letter again. He knew.

"Well?"

Adam's sharp eyes emerged over the folded-and-refolded paper, peering through the smoke. 

Lascaux pointed at the letter with his cigarette. "Are you going to marry her or not?"

Adam blinked. Lascaux would remember that for years after as a rare victory. "I... what do you mean?"

"It wasn't a rhetorical question, Smithson. Yumei writes you love letters, perfumed in God-knows-what. You write them back, cologned in God-knows-what you wear, with me as your dutiful editor."

"I don't have a house, Vic."

"Buy one."

"Real estate--"

"Get an apartment. Build a house. Live at home with your fucking parents, even." Lascaux flicked an ember expertly into a waiting ashtray. "There's a war on, if you haven't taken a look the papers recently. Men like you are in short supply, and tend to have shorter lives."

Adam ran a hand through his hair. "I... I want to. God! Of course I want to! Who wouldn't? But--"

"Are you a man, Smithson?"

"I--"

"Yes or no, Smithson. Are you a man?"

A pause. Iron and fire. "Yes." Conviction.

"Then we know your answer." Lascaux flicks away hot ash, forcing himself not to smile.

\---

He was the best man at the wedding.

When he rose to his feet to give a toast, his speech was ready in his mind. He cracked his neck. How it would be the perfect blend of commendation and insult. Damnation with the faintest of praise. Enough to get him adopted into the (good) Marx family. Just enough.

But everything came out wrong. He lost the thread and hung himself with it. First he started with how they met, and how they bonded, and suddenly there was a story that made them seem like best friends. And the days at the range with the bows. And then how he helped Adam write letters, and...

Oh, by the end of it, there were tears in the Smithsons' eyes. Even the children, usually playing and restless, had stilled to listen. The guests rose and gave _him_ a standing ovation.

Adam and Yumei clapping the loudest of them all.

\---

"... Speak, or hold your peace."

Lascaux was a statue, but rage shook his guts apart.


	3. Who is the Strength of

Adam and Yumei were making love.

Lascaux was sure of it. He wished he wasn’t.

He regretted buying the house across the street from them—they had convinced him so easily. Good price, rising land value, progressive enough for a mixed couple, quiet neighborhood—

He flicks an eye toward the dark windows of the Smithson residence. No… not entirely dark. Beyond that glass he can see the faint glimmer of candlelight.

Lascaux scoffed at himself, poured himself another glass, turned the radio down. Quiet neighborhood. Sure.

He doesn’t resent them. He damn well contributed to this, didn’t he? Back with the letters. How Adam was so… conservative. Traditional. Boyish in his innocence when all else about him was the template for manhood. 

“You want to fuck her?”

Adam had stiffened at that, turning over in his bunk. “What?”

“We’re on letter six.” Lascaux lazily drew the number in the air with his cigarette smoke. “Most people your age fuck on date three.”

His expression… grew guarded, pensive. He twirled the fountain pen in his fingers—Lascaux’s pen, because God as his witness Lascaux would not let Adam write with a fucking ballpoint.

“You told her you liked kissing her.”

“That’s different. You don’t—write things like that. Say them, sure. But write them?”

Lascaux shrugged. “That’s how you feel, isn’t it?”

Adam makes a noise.

“Say again, Smithson?”

“I said no.”

Lascaux’s blood froze. And from those veins, slow as a glacier, came anger unbidden. “You—you—!”

“Animals fuck, Vic. Johns fuck hookers. Yumei—” He said the name with a careful reverence, his tongue not touching the syllables as they left his mouth— “She deserves more. I want to make love to her, Vic. In a real bed. With candles, and oil, and roses, and music, and, and—”

Lascaux raised a hand. He pointed with his cigarette to the pen.

“Tell her. Not me.” 

He remembers that night vividly. Smithson was so wound up after putting that thing in the envelope he had to jack off three times.

After that, Adam would start omitting certain parts of Yumei’s letters. Lascaux didn’t have much of an imagination, but he didn’t particularly want to imagine Adam entwined with some woman anyway.

And yet there he sat, in his house, his whiskey glass cool and his face hot, as Adam and Yumei entwined themselves over and over again, just across the street.

He downs the glass. Chews the ice. Works at his belt, eyes closed.

\---

There was some difficulty, of course, in the beginning. Letters with a return address with a Chinese name? Adam’s record was like polished chrome but they summoned him for questioning anyways. Letters to a sweetheart? Even worse. A white man and a black woman could live in peace in the more civilized parts of the nation. But a white man and a Chinese woman? A white military man? The boys in Psy Ops swore that every Chinese vagina was an opium-laced honeypot, citizen or no.

Lascaux began to route the comings and goings of Smithson’s superiors—where they were and when. He dug a bit into their histories—marital problems, children known or unknown. It was an idle entertainment.

Adam returned from interrogation. The letters continued, unmolested.

Lascaux lost interest in Smithson’s superiors.

\---

When the Smithsons have house parties and Lascaux makes a tactical retreat upstairs to escape the triviality of civilian life, sometimes he passes by their bedroom.

And sometimes he looks at their bed. A lot different from the bunk, he would think.

He knows that, were he more brave and less wise, he would dare to touch it.

But he doesn’t. He looks, and carries on down the hallway, ignores the muffled voices and laughter and music below.

\---

“We… don’t really know how to tell you this, Vic.”

They’re sitting in the living room. Adam and Yumei on one couch, Lascaux alone on the other. The couple are holding hands—tightly, their rings all aglow in the morning sunshine. Lascaux holds his glass of bourbon tightly, too.

“We haven’t told anyone else,” Yumei continued, her eyes bright and wet. She cast them down to the carpet, heaved a sigh. “But… it’s you. We love you. I think we can tell you.”

_They’re Communists. Oh my fucking God they’re Communists. You’ve spent the better part of a decade in their life and you never noticed. You gave Yumei the benefit of the doubt since she was born stateside and claimed there wasn’t a thing left in China she cared for and even with all your Psy Ops training you didn’t notice a thing. That’s why they share so much with you, it’s collectivism. Oh my fucking God._

__

__

_Oh my fucking God._

But Lascaux did not feel outrage or betrayal. Instead, he wonders how he will help keep this from the neighbors.

“We’re pregnant,” Adam and Yumei said together. They looked at each other in surprise, laughed, held each other closer. They were both crying in happiness.

Lascaux’s eyes feel warm, dense, like there’s something behind them. “About damned time,” he says, lifting his glass.


	4. Who is Righteous as

The first trimester was simple enough. Oh, certainly—morning sickness, vomiting here and there, and the cravings, of course. Not chocolate or strawberries or, God forbid, Nuka-Cola—Yumei had never really cared for sweetness—but smoked sardines, of all things. And the occasional Kalamata olive, albeit pitted, to her annoyance. Adam meant well, but he could overworry sometimes.

If it was bad for Yumei, Lascaux could commiserate—no smoking in the Smithson house, at his own behest. So whenever he was over there, which was quite often, he’d find himself chewing ice until his gums went numb. 

Of course… there was the increased sex drive. It went unspoken, of course, for there’s no need. Lascaux could see it in the way Yumei looks at Adam with a possessive pride, arrays herself archly in his presence like an odalisque. The way Adam is languid and smiling and his face smells of her—

Lascaux continued chipping away with the ice pick. The ice in his hand took shape.

\---

When Adam had to leave for D. C. for unexpected advisory work, Lascaux slept on their couch (the comfortable one, not facing the window). He wasn't too concerned about Yumei, vomiting or not, she can take care of herself—but it’s for Adam’s peace of mind. And a happy Adam is a happy Yumei. So he stayed.

The Smithson house looks different at night, though. And in the quiet, in the dark, memories emerge.

_"Treason against the federal government in a capital crime, Mr. Lascaux."_

_The pistol feels curiously light in his hand. He cocks the hammer._

_He aims—right between the eyes—and fires three times._

_The white room is now the red room._

_His ears ring._

_"Highly commendable, Mr. Lascaux."_

_Let freedom ring._

“Hey.”

Lascaux jerked up violently, hand groping for a pistol that’d left him a long time ago.

Yumei was leaning against the threshold of the living room, arms crossed. Her eyes seemed to reflect light from nowhere. “Can’t sleep either, I see.”

“Evidently.” Lascaux moved over on the couch to give her some space. Yumei didn't move.

“If…” The word hung until dead. She sighs, begins anew. “You can’t sleep here, can you? Not—” She gestured to the room. “Like this.”

Lascaux looked away. “I’m staying. I’m not leaving you.”

Yumei crossed the carpet on bare feet and turned on one light. Then another. And another. With each light, she coalesced into view, clearer and clearer, her swollen belly somehow as natural a part of her as her ears or toenails. 

“The neighbors will talk.”

“Then let them choke on their tongues.”

Lascaux surprised himself with his laugh.

\---

Lascaux and Adam never really told each other about… what they were doing, out in the field.

It wasn’t some adherence to confidentiality, or paranoia, or anything like that. They simply knew well enough what each other’s work life was like—the blood and guts and gunsmoke and torture and taunts in broken English over a supposedly secure radio frequency—and they would talk about anything else. 

Electricians don’t talk about burns and plumbers don’t talk about shit.

“So, now, just between you and me—”

There is no _‘you and me,’_ Lascaux thought dimly as he retrieved his daily inoculation of advertisements and propaganda from his mailbox. He glances sidelong at Mr. Wagner, who was leaning on his white-picket fence ( _my fucking fence_ ), his evening rum and Nuka-Cola in hand.

“I think something serious is going on in the upper brass,” Wagner intoned with the assuredness of a civilian talking out of his ass. “Of course, you and Adam, you’re close, you know this—but he’s been gone more and more. Must be very serious,” he declared to Lascaux’s mailbox.

“Huh.”

“It’s a real shame. Lovely wife, baby on the way. Man can’t enjoy the simple things in life.” He drank. Smacked his lips. “That’s the cost of being a patriot, though. He’s a real American hero, to put his life on the line like that. Boy’s got tricolor blood.”

“Huh.”

“It must have been something,” Wagner said pensively, looking at the rim of his glass. “Going to West Point with the guy. Seeing him in action. They'll make movies about him, when this is all over.”

Adam and Lascaux were never deployed together, but this neighborhood couldn’t seem to remember that beyond a day. So Lascaux said nothing.

“I regret it, sometimes, going to Columbia. Going into the business. Part of me wanted to enlist, but…” Wagner moves his body in what Lascaux presumed was a guiltless shrug. “Plans. Family. Expectation. Reds are a plague, God damn them, but you can’t throw all that tuition away, you know?”

“Huh.”

Wagner clapped a hand on the fence. “See, this is why I like you, Victor, you talk sense. You try talking politics with Roger—” He made a spiral motion with a finger. “Like a broken record. Reds are already in the government, Reds are putting mind control dust in the water, Reds are putting Marx in the schoolbooks.” He drank, again, and was perplexed to find his glass empty. “Well! That’s enough talking shop for tonight. Have a good one, Victor!” 

Silhouetted by the sunset, Mr. Wagner walked across his immaculate green lawn to his front door. In a practiced motion, Lascaux drew an invisible pistol and aligned the invisible sights with the man’s balding head.

The _‘BANG!’_ didn’t ring out in Lascaux’s mind. His arm dropped, clutched at his mail. He fucking despised Wagner, fine—but he was the first person in the neighborhood to greet Adam and Yumei when they moved in. The first one to share a pew in church. The first to induct them into the Neighborhood Communist Watch. The first to threaten Roger with a broken nose when, after a few drinks and halfway into a game of billiards, Roger pondered aloud if Yumei had a slanted cunt, too.

Had Wagner said nothing, Lascaux would be in prison for shoving a pool cue through Roger’s skull, so in a way, he was in the fat bastard’s debt.

Fuck him for it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Let's see how this goes._


End file.
